Archive for Video game

In this case it’s literally a golden oldie, as the cartridge was gold (at least the earliest ones). And I still have that yellowing piece of plastic in my “cart box” but I didn’t actually need it this time (I sold my NES years ago anyway). This time, I booted the classic up on OpenEmu, an awesome new mac 8 and 16 bit emulator with masterly emulations of all the great 80s and early 90s systems (Gameboy, NES, SNES, Genesis, etc). Hey, and it’s fair use, because I did keep that cartridge (along with my other favorites).

For good reason, as The Legend of Zelda is one of the all time greats. A classic console game. A classic RPG. First in a legendary (haha) series and really one of the best games of all time, particularly when you place it into its context in the history of video games. Oh, and this time, I played it with my 5 year-old son. He mostly consulted from the arm of the chair (as the game is pretty hard), but he did love it, begging to play it day-in and day-out.

First a note on the emulation: Pretty much pitch perfect. I plugged a PS3 joypad into the Mac and the game looked, felt, and sounded exactly as it always did. The joypad controls are basically the same as a NES pad (except you don’t get that awful thumb burn the sharp plastic on the original led to). This is essential as emulated games require the right kind of controller. Console and arcade games are programmed for specific controllers — I should know, having shipped 9 of them! — and they just don’t play right unless the hardware/software pairing is nearly exact. The emulator also allows you to save your state, which isn’t necessary with Zelda, as it has a battery backup (also emulated), but certainly helps with other games.

So how was it? Surprisingly, hardly dated at all. Fantasy is my favorite genre, hell, I convinced my dad to buy the computer so I could write a D&D magnum opus. And early games like Wizardry, Alkabeth, and Ultima I, were among my computer favorites. Adventure (the original Atari 2600 cart game) was another old favorite and is the clear progenitor to Zelda. This notion of video game pedigree has long been of interest to me. Like any other human art, games borrow from those who came before. And there’s nothing wrong with this. To claim that Zelda is any less a work of genius because it shares elements with earlier fantasy games is pure hogwash. The good ones integrate and add to the oeuvre. We will call the Adventure/Zelda school, which also includes arcade game Venture and who knows how many others, the action RPG.

The Zelda “stats screen” was extensive for the time

Zelda doesn’t have character stats or experience like Ultima and Wizardry (which borrow more heavily from D&D), but it does have a fantasy setting an an upgradable character. In fact, one of Zelda’s cooler features is its large number of items/powerups. You can up Link’s hit points (hearts), collect three swords, 2-3 shields, and a bevy of rings, bows, magic wands, and other magic items. I would argue that even a modern action dungeon crawler like Diablo III is a clear Zelda descendant.

The monstrous outside world

What Zelda does have is a big outside world, nine (x2 sorta) sprawling dungeons, a host of enemies, lots of secrets, and a tough but addictive joypad-based action gameplay. The map is positively gimongous‎ by the standards of 1986. And this is many ways in which the gap between Adventure and Zelda is huge. Not only are there a lot of screens, but they actually look like something (Adventure‘s graphics are notoriously simplistic). The above map is comprised of 16×8 screens, each a bit different. The dungeons and various secret entrances and caves are tucked all over the place.

A typical outside screen, complete with enemies and cave

Wandering the outside takes up a good amount of time, with Link traversing between various dungeons and hunting for secrets. The outdoor enemies are tough at the start of the game, but easy enough once Link has powered up with the Blue Ring, Magic Shield, and some sort of distance weapon (the magic wand being one of the better ones). This brings me to one of Zelda’s design quirks. As the game progresses you increase the number of hearts (hit points), but when you die you always reset to three filled hearts. This necessitates visiting either a fairy or farming the monsters for hearts to reach full heath (often needed to get through a dungeon). And even odder by today’s standards, is the fact that only at full health can you fire the “beam sword” (launch your sword across the screen). This effectively makes the game “harder” when you’ve been hit, which goes against modern game design, but was typical of the more hardcore spirit of yesteryear. In fact, this whole setup isn’t so different from the typical arcade one in which you power up a life (typical in shooters like R-Type or even pseudo action RPG / platformer Ghouls and Ghosts). Zelda can be fairly unforgiving. The dpad control is a bit squirrelly, and the slightest bump against a foe or his flickery projectiles can cost you a heart (and your precious beam sword). It rewards patience and keeping your distance. Enemies randomly drop various gems (rupees), hearts, fairies, bombs, and the like. As my son put it, they can be “mean and stingy” (meaning that the RNG can really make or break you).

Fairy, how I love thee

This also brings me to one of Zelda’s more peculiar design decisions. The world is littered with difficult to locate “secrets.” These stairs, caves, and the like are hidden behind indistinguishable spots all over the world that need to be bombed or “flamed” open. Inside are various powerups, vendors, quest items, and even dungeons. How the hell any “real” player (unaided) is supposed to find these? I have no idea. Today, in the age of the internet, one just uses a handy guide like this one. But in the 80s? We had to rely on Nintendo Power Magazine! This was one of Ninetendo’s dirty marketing tricks back then. Pretty much, to play these games, you had to have the right issue of Nintendo Power (with its dedicated hint guides). They used to sell millions of issues a month! I also read that producer and all around genius Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to create a game in which players had to “communicate and collaborate.” Well, I guess he did.

A typical dungeon room. Features: top door locked until all monsters are dead, left door locked with key, right wall busted open with bomb, boomerang hurling enemies

The dungeons are where most of the real difficulty is. Dying here brings you back to the start, but you keep anything you have acquired. Bombed out walls stay bombed, but monsters often/sometimes respawn. The problem is, you have to chose between slogging through another try with three hearts or heading out into the world to farm hearts, which will result in full respawns inside the dungeon. Later in the game judicious purchases of healing food and help here. Enemy difficulty is highly variable and while it does progress as you move through the game, it isn’t linear. Certain nasties like the Darknuts (can only be hit from behind/side) and the ghosts are far harder than others. The Like-Likes are positively mean, as they can steal your shield. Different rooms have different combinations and some can be quite frustrating (lots of Darknuts at the same time as fireball spitters!). Each dungeon has 1-2 magic items to acquire plus a compass and a map (which help fill in that screen in the upper left). At the end is a final boss, another heart container, and part of the “Triforce” (which although triangular, contains 8 pieces, so perhaps “Octforce” would have been a better name).

This hydra boss is typical

Each dungeon has a boss at the end. Each is seemingly difficult but usually possesses a “weakness” that while not always obvious, makes them fairly trivial. Some are vulnerable at different times or to different weapons (usually found in their own dungeon). This hydra guy above is more technique based, you have to strike each head 2-4 times (without getting hit by the fireballs). The earlier heads will “spin off” and attack you (just dodge them). Killing the last head will slay it. Basically, it’s all about the dodge and strike. Some bosses return in later dungeons as “sub bosses” with slightly different traits.

This about sums up the plot

The game is light on plot: reassemble the Triforce, rescue the Princess Zelda, and save Hyrule. Better barely no plot than a dumb one that rubs itself in your face! Some of the messages along the way include bonus misspellings courtesy of their translation from the Japanese. Oh so fun!

All in all, Zelda remains intensely playable. While it might be a fairly frustrating at times, it’s never so hard that putting it aside for a couple hours doesn’t lead to immediate progress on returning. This is a pretty big game with a ton of variety, and it’s all packed into 128kb!! Yeah, that’s right, about the size of one highly compressed small internet jpeg ! Code, music, art, everything. And it was a big cart at the time, costing around $90-100 1986 dollars! Now it’s about the size of the average email in my inbox. There is even a “second quest” in which you can replay the game with a slightly different layout and higher difficulty.

Awesome game and a seminal mark in the history of the fantasy RPG. Even WOW owes a debt to Zelda.

My 5 year-old son Alex would like to offer his own review (typed completely verbatim):

When you play Legend of Zelda you go to a first dungeon, a second dungeon, a third dungeon, a fourth dungeon, a fifth dungeon, a sixth dungeon, a seventh dungeon, an eighth dungeon, a ninth dungeon and then you win the game. You might run into big bosses and scary Darknuts and ghosts and bats and blobs and bombs. And sometimes you can bomb a secret a door and collect keys and gems and hearts. Watch out to get no hearts or you start all over again. But after you finish the whole game on the nine dungeons you unlock the queen (Princess Zelda). And you won the game!

With The Last of Us, the trajectory Naughty Dog has been pursuing for over a decade reaches for and achieves new heights. This synergy of world building, gameplay integration, emersion, and story telling really began with Jak & Daxter. True, with Crash Bandicoot, we made inroads in all but the last (anyone remember the “Crash, can you find my battery?” plot of Crash 2?). Crash focused on integrating addictive gameplay with a consistent, coherent, and lavishly produced setting (I’ll include character in this setting), but it didn’t have any true story or drama.

The Jak franchise introduced a more elaborate narrative and characters with more complexity, particularly in Jak 2 where we started integrating the cinematic segments in a more interwoven fashion. The Uncharted franchise took this to new levels, essentially becoming Indiana Jones type movies that you played, but TLOU climbs yet another step further, delivering characters you care about , true drama, and intense cinematic language while preserving a completely coherent style and intense gameplay. Everything about the game serves to reinforce the overall tone: the pathos of two people trying to heal in the face of great horror.

The art design is fabulous. Again, even though the Art Director (Erick Pangilinan) is one of my best friends (obviously biasing me) this is objectively true. It’s certainly one of the best looking games to date. There is a deliberate choice to heavily light — stylistically overlight — the entire game. While there exist some dark underground parts, for the most part, the lighting is luminous. Intense white light (think Minority Report) starkly bathes this ruined vision of America. No gloriously decayed texture is left hidden. Closeups of characters show every stain and frayed thread in clothes worn for months (perhaps years?). This is a world of contrast. Lush greenery has reclaimed much of the urban landscape, yet crumbled concrete, rusted steel, and burned out cars litter the scenery. As do sordid blood stains and desiccated corpses. There is a sense here of great violence, and desperation, much of it in the past. Little details abound. Shrines to dead loved ones. A tiny grave marked with a teddy bear. Family photos. Rarely does it look cloned or stamped (although that door with the weird seal is everywhere) . Nor, despite a strong and coherent visual style, is it repetitive. As we move from the Northeast to the Heartland to the Mountains the scenery — and even the seasons — keep changing. Weather is used to great effect. The rain in early Boston sequences is stunning, as is the chilling lakeside blizzard late in the game’s second act.

The view took my breath away

The minimalist string music compounds the game’s haunting atmosphere. While the game is full of detail, it’s in the broad sense, fairly stark — as the bulk of the scenery is ruined and deserted. This lends the whole world a quality of emptiness reinforced by the matching sonic starkness. The sound effects are harsh and solidly naturalistic, emphasizing both the natural (bird noises) and the discordant tone of decayed materials (like rusted garage doors opening). To this background soundscape is added the grim punctuation of the combat sounds. Every grunt, sneaker squeak, bolt action, and gurgling last breath is vividly apparent.

There is a minimalism to the interface that fits with the overall tone. The title screen is a single frozen camera shot of a window. The menus are barely styled and contain only exactly what they need. The art is simple and iconic. Not only does this work from a stylistic point of view, enhancing the serious tone of the game, but the controls are direct and to the point, easy to use, preventing you from getting distracted by mechanics. With TLOU, it’s the story and characters that matter, not the mechanics of saving a game. Many elements traditional in modern titles are toned down or absent. Achievements? Not part of this world. Secret collectables? The game has them — in the form of Firefly pendants — but they are understated mementos of the dead, not the bombastic collectables typical of the genre.

Minimalist interface

Technically the engine steps out of the limelight and just delivers — and delivers in spades. Bugs are minor and few and far between. I never crashed or got stuck. There are some frame rate problems in the biggest and widest of shots (and they do look gorgeous) or sometimes with the flashlight or “hearing mode,” but this never hurts the gameplay. I noticed a couple extremely minor graphical glitches. Mostly stuff just works, often combining multiple disciplines in classic Naughty Dog brilliance. The animation, particularly in interaction with the backgrounds and other characters, is a triumph of both art and programming. It’s perhaps the slickest, most lifelike, ever used in a game. The AI is first rate. The environments feel wide open and vast, and they have a certain non linearity, yet because of the nature of the game you must be contained, and it’s done very artfully. Rubble fills stairwells, broken down vehicles block alleys, collapsed bridges deter overzealous exploration. So much of what makes this game look so great is the amazing synergy between art and tech. The rain, the water, the snow, the glowing light effects, the realistic shadowing and flashlight. It’s all solidly in both realms.

Hunger games much?

Different elements of the gameplay work well together. The game’s phenomenal pacing is made up of story cuts, intense combat, sneaking, and scavenging. This last, which is surprisingly satisfying, is sometimes done in the heat of battle — or at least when hiding from deadly foes and desperately looking to bolster ones supplies — and sometimes an end all onto itself. These quieter moments, after a brace of nasties are defeated, or in an abandoned section of city, are welcome relief. The game rarely has enemies sneak up on you once a section has been identified as safe, so these provide a nice break in the tension. The crafting itself is simple. There are a 4-5 resources and similar construction costs for pairs of items. Healthpacks and molotov cocktails share resources, as do shivs and weapon enhancements. Everything is in short supply and desperately useful. Pills can be used to upgrade your character, but you must chose in which manner. Spare parts upgrade guns and the like. The weapons are nicely differentiated, each with it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and they get noticeably better when upgraded. The shortage of ammo always prevents any weapon from being overpowering. Even the assault riffle, gained in the last level, isn’t too fearsome against your body armored opponents.

I dare you to put one of these in your bedroom

Let’s discuss the gameplay. Technically TLOU is a 3rd person shooter, but it makes a number of stylistic alterations in service of mood that completely alter the feel. This isn’t your typical shooter where ammunition is plentiful, the character sponges up bullets, and healing is easy. You can only survive a handful of hits. The arrival of more than 2-3 mobs in close proximity is a near certain recipe for death. The healthpacks (potions) take some time to apply and are in short supply. Joel and Ellie do a lot of creeping around in the shadows. The key here is to avoid agroing too many mobs, and when you do, to lose them by getting out of the way. A number of mechanics serve this end.

There are a lot of shadows. Counters and obstacles are conveniently crouching height (this rarely looks forced). You can creep around fairly rapidly. Humans can see and often probe the darkness with flashlights. The infected are generally blind (or crazy) and so are easier to sneak up on — but clickers and bloaters are tough and can kill you in one bite. Joel (and Ellie) have quite the sense of hearing and can “hear” through nearby walls to spot the outlines of enemies. This is a little gamey, and the mobs apparently can’t do it, but in practice works quite well. One of the most effective strategies, particularly with the infected, is to stay in stealth at all costs. There are a couple of ways to kill silently (more or less). Humans and runners can be strangled or knifed (which wears out your blades but is quicker). The bow can be used to silently kill most opponents at a distance and if you’re lucky, you won’t break your arrows. Overall it is deeply fulfilling to wipe out a whole crew without them ever seeing you. This often requires replaying the section several times to learn the layout and careful looting of every possible supply.

Speaking of which, the looting, scavenging, and crafting mechanic is awesome. Everything is so scarce, ammo so valuable, and everything you craft so useful that a few items easily make the difference between life and death. It’s also extremely satisfying to evade some opponents, sneak around, craft an extra shiv or health pack and then kill them. You can augment the melee weapons to make them kill faster (very useful as while melee is satisfying, should a second or third mob show up while you are pummeling someone, it’s bad news). You can build shivs (essential for fast silent kills, surviving clickers, opening secret doors) or healthpacks or a number of bombs. The bombs come in three types. Molotovs, nailbombs, and smokebombs. Each have their use. The fire is great against infected. The nailbombs can be thrown OR left around as mines. I didn’t appreciate the smokebombs until near the end of the game, but they create a kind of dead zone that the human mobs won’t fire into and which can be used to kill them. Used sequentially and in tandem with the flame thrower they make a lethal combination.

Moments like these are genuinely touching

I have a few quibbles. The aiming can be difficult at times, particularly until you upgrade “weapon shake.” It’s few hard to land a head shot (or even sometimes a shot) before someone shoots you. When opponents are behind you or off to the side it can be frustrating to try to turn and strike them. There is some kind of quick turn around move. I didn’t master it (but should have). Some sections with lots of enemies are quite hard. There appears to be at least a bit of DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment) to help you get by if you die a lot in one spot. Actually fighting bloaters and particularly bloaters together with clickers can be VERY hard.

I’m betting TLOU required A LOT of tuning to reach its current fun factor, as it would be easy for gameplay involving so much hiding, creeping, and dying to be boring — but the elements combine to make it really fun. After the first chapter I learned to become methodical and search every corner for loot. Instead of being tedious, this served as a break from the tension and turned out to be incredibly satisfying. The melee is extremely graphic with a good amount of variety. It’s quite creepy hearing a guard gurgle as you strangle him or slamming an infected in the neck with a baseball bat “augmented” with taped on scissors. Everything serves the horrifying mood.

Uh oh!

And mood is one of the game’s greatest strengths. TLOU draws from nearly every post apocalyptic source and builds trope after trope into a satisfying, coherent, and perhaps more realistic whole. It’s prettier and less hopeless than The Road — and considerably more believable. No film could ever offer this scope. The sets (or CGI) would be far too expensive, the cast too enormous. Yet TLOU also strives to compete with film in terms of emotional engagement and character development. I’d argue it succeeds.

The longer form (it took me 18 hours to play through on normal difficulty) helps with the character part. I’m becoming of the increasing opinion that film is actually an unsatisfying format — offering far too little depth, particularly in this day and age when the 2-3 hours are mostly consumed by overlong effects driven fights. Some of TLOU’s vignettes should come off as forced, as they are drawn directly from tropes and fairly straightforward. One that comes to mind is when the hunter humvee murders two innocents while a hiding Joel and Ellie watch. However, in the context of the game and characters it was surprisingly effective. TLOU is a clear case where the whole transcends the sum of the parts. And hell, a lot of the parts are pretty damn good.

Can we say creepy?

Neil Druckmann (who I hired as a promising intern programmer a whole career ago) turns out an emotional script. Again, it draws extremely heavily from tropes. Everything any post apocalyptic survival story has ever had is here: hunters, cannibals, resistance leaders, a cure, friends who turn (into zombies), reversals, quarantine zones, etc. But in moments little and big the relationship between Joel and Ellie builds — so much so that the little downtime conversations are real gems. By the time the Pittsburg chapter concludes, Ellie becomes in your head someone really worth fighting for — and the remainder of the game — wow, it really delivers. I often feel (reading or watching) that the second half lets me down. Good as the first half of TLOU is, the second is several times better.

Really notable for me was the entire “winter” sequence. Coming out of a really emotional turn in Colorado TLOU employs cinematic language and plotting in a highly effective way. So much do we care for the characters, and so pretty is the game, that it manages to make 10 minutes of trudging through the snow exhilarating! And that’s only the beginning. I really liked the way the game cut back and forth between playable Joel and Ellie as it told the story from both perspectives. Although, I have a slight nitpick with the “arc” of the section villain, who starts out with some complexity and sympathy and turns monster without too much explanation. But such is the momentum of this story that it sails right over speed-bumps like this.

So basically, if you care about video games at all, play The Last of Us.

I was recently asked a couple of questions about the early days of Playstation 2 development…

My first dev unit looked more or less like this

Can you remember your first reaction when you saw the PS2 for the first time?

My first PS2 glimpse was hardly typical. In the spring of 1999, I had to go down to LAX and claim my prototype unit. It was one of the first to leave Japan (a few weeks earlier we had sent an employee to Tokyo to get one and he’d been turned back at the airport because the customs people thought it might be a weapons computer!). It took several hours of walking paperwork around freight offices behind the airport to claim my prize. When I did, I dug through the giant crate of peanuts to uncover a handmade aluminum cube about 18 inches square, filled with wire wrapped circuit boards. It smelled like ozone. The shell was a bit bent in transit and I was terrified it wouldn’t work. But it did.

What most impressed you technically when you started to work with PS2?

At first, the thing was a beast. Well, later it was still a beast. But what was really impressive once you got into it was how much floating point vector math you could do on the vector units if you took the time to program them. This was HARD. Seriously HARD, but the things worked all from on chip memory and were ridiculously powerful for the time.

Did you notice any wider changes to gaming, culturally for example, as a result of the PS2’s impact?

The PS2 had sufficient horsepower to make games look fairly realistic. You could actually put motion captured human models in a game and have them look okay. On the PS1, this was hopeless. Take a look at how blocky Lara Croft was back in the day and you’ll see what I mean. The ability to have human characters drove the whole style of games in a much more realistic and film-like direction. Before that, games were much more cartoon in style.

The more official dev unit that came many months later

What one, stand-out factor do you think helped PS2 become so successful?

It was small. It played DVDs. The price was reasonable, and the games rocked.

What do you think was PS2’s most technically accomplished or innovative game and why?

I’d say that the Jak & Daxter games were certainly among the most technically accomplished. Our engine was really customized for the machine, and it was a machine that really rewarded custom design. The architecture wasn’t like anything else. But we were evolutionary in game design and there were certainly games that innovated more in genre. The PS2’s middle and late periods brought some really innovative and creative games like Katamari Damacy, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Okami.

What do you think will be PS2’s lasting legacy?

I think the Playstation in general, and the PS2 in particular, really brought video games out of the Mario/Zelda kiddie style and into direct parity with the other broad entertainment mediums like film. The stylistic line between an effects laden blockbuster and a big video game is very thin. There’s even been a lot of back-flow as video game sensibilities push into other mediums.

The months leading up to the launch of Wrath of the Lich King were very exciting for me. First of all, my son was about to be born — in fact, he was scheduled to arrive just days after LK! And on a WOW front, Blizzard pushed the 3.0.x series of patches 4-6 weeks in advance of the expansion itself.

Before Heading North

Patch 3.0.x introduced the most sweeping changes of any infrastructure patch yet — and a lot of it was content of a sort. We got the usual full reworking of the classes and talent trees. This didn’t itself add any content, but yet it did. One consequence was a substantial increase in average dps output. All of a sudden, impossible raid bosses were now difficult… but doable. Our guild, which previously could kill Arche and Illidan on a good night, starting trouncing them and moving through Sunwell.

Over Achiever

Just as significant, was the brand new achievement system. Blizzard hardly invented achievements, but in their usual fashion, took what other did and did it better. The WOW achievement system launched with an overwhelming array of achievements and meta-achievements (more than 500). These didn’t give you any in-game advantage, but they sure felt cool and opened up fun vanity awards such as pets, mounts, and titles.

Even before LK itself shipped, I spent countless hours grinding out certainly achievement types. I’m a completist (i.e. type A) and I thought I’d knocked off almost every quest in Azeroth. Well, it still took me about three weeks to complete the Azeroth and Outland sections of Loremaster (an achievement and title awarded for doing every quest in the game).

The patch also moved pets, mounts, and currencies into new interface tabs. This opened up a lot of bag space and made it reasonable to invest heavily in collecting the cute little beasties. I was already a bit of a pet collector, but in the month or so before LK went nuts with grinding out every cool pet I could. Unless the grind was particularly horrific (Hyacinth Macaw), I got it. This included rarities like the Black Tabby Cat and Disgusting Oozeling. I always had the most pets of anyone I knew.

One of the great things about the achievement system was that it opened up countless different avenues of time investiture to choose from. I worked on questing, dungeons, seasonal events, and pets. Others might have worked on PVP, reputation, or whatever. Every aspect of the game was covered and it brought new life into many of them.

WOW Achievements

Holiday Fun

Patch 3.0.x shipped during the busy WOW holiday season that includes Brew Fest, Hallows Eve, Winter’s Veil etc. In the Vanilla period, I treated holidays as curious decoration. A few minutes doing the Winter’s Veil chains in 2005 showed them to yield… pretty much nothing and that was the last of it.

During Burning Crusade, Blizzard introduced the first holiday boss, the Headless Horseman. Not only was he a fun new boss, but he dropped a bit of epic loot. Serious toons like my Warlock had much better gear anyway, but he was great for grabbing a good ring for your alt. He was so popular that the Dire Brew boss, Ahune, and the Valentine’s boss soon followed.

But achievements took the holidays to a new level. They provided a road map of weird activities during each holiday. And if you did everything for the holiday, you got a title. And, even better, if you did everything for every holiday (which took a year) you could earn a 310% speed special purple dragon mount! At the time, these fast mounts were very hard to come by. Usually only the most hardcore raiders could hope to earn one.

So that Halloween I tried (successfully) to finish the holiday meta, which was in those days pretty f**king stressful. Blizzard has since made them much easier, but that first year there were some achievements that required a lot of luck and a lot of grinding. To maximize your odds, you had to really knock everything out as soon as you could during the holiday in case there was some troublesome random number based task. Also, at the beginning of the holiday, the crowds generally made most things easier. And there were some serious crowds. The holidays were never too popular before, but the rush to earn the achievements brought out a serious frenzy of players.

The Headless Horseman: Holiday boss extroidnaire

The Big Day

Burning Crusade was so cool that I was very excited for Lich King. Plus, the trailer was badass. I even waited outside at midnight to buy my pre-ordered Collector’s Edition. This was the last time I bothered. I still got CEs (for the pets) but I just ordered them from Amazon and waited the extra 12 hours.

I bought a new Macbook Pro a couple weeks before just to make sure I could play in the hospital with my tired wife and freshly minted son. This actually worked pretty well, newborns sleep a lot.

Heroic Faceroll

Anyway: the endgame.

Historically, dungeons made up the bulk of early endgame play. I dinged level 80 and some guildies invited me into a Heroic. Yeah, that’s right. No keys. No attunement. No grinding to Revered reputation. Just hop right in… and crush the dungeon in 20-30 minutes!

Huh? Not only were dungeons short, which was obvious even while leveling, but even the Heroics were incredibly easy. I never ran a single level 80 non-heroic instance. There was no need. Your quest gear would easily carry you in Heroics, and the rewards were much better. Better gear, more rep, and more badges (more on that later). Crowd control was completely useless. Pats? Who cares? The tank just grabbed a pile of mobs, you nuked them down, repeat.

A few specific fights were kinda hard at the beginning of the expansion: Skadi in Utgrade Pinnacle, and the final bosses of Oculus and Halls of Lightning. As a consequence, those last two were the least popular instances.

For those that liked a challenge, every dungeon had 2-4 funky achievements that involved weird ways of beating bosses. Some were quite hard and almost all required a group that played together regularly. Getting all these achievements earned you a cool mount and provided quite a time sink for the dedicated few.

Badges for Everyone

LK took the badge system developed in BC to a whole new level. It introduced two (soon to grow to four, then six) badge currencies for PVE alone. Badges of Heroism came from 5 man Heroics and 10 man raids and Badges of Valor from 25 man raids. Both allowed the purchase of good endgame gear. The lower currency epics were the same grade as the heroic epics. The better currency similar to the first tier of 25 man raiding.

In practice, this meant that you wanted lots and lots of badges at first. For several weeks, even Heroism badges were useful. Soon enough, at least for classes with damage only specs, you wouldn’t need those so much (except maybe for the new Heirloom gear). But Valor badges, you could always use those. And even the heroics let you earn two of those a day by running the “daily dungeon.”

All of this meant that it was advantageous to run 5 man dungeons long after you needed anything the dungeons themselves dropped. As they were easy to begin with and most players out-geared them rapidly, they became mindless zergs (see below).

The currency tab: have a few badge types!

Rep Hubs & Tabards

LK gave us more reputations than ever. Most zones had one. Some of these had small clusters of repetitive daily quests you could use to grind to exalted. Those with quests mostly yielded cosmetic or profession benefits. The grinds were fairly short, usually around 2 weeks.

While in BC each dungeon yielded a specific rep, LK instituted tabards that allowed you to earn the rep of your choice while running Heroics. This meant that it was only a matter of time before you brought all tabard reps to exalted, but usually, by the time it happened, you didn’t need much they had to offer. Each rep did have an epic or two, and so the first couple were useful, particularly if they had dailies to speed up the process.

Professions, both of the crafting sort and the basic cooking and fishing, usually each got a single daily quest. Instead of having recipes drop all over the world randomly, the were usually sold by the profession vendor in exchange for a new currency given by the profession daily. So, for cooking, you ran your quick little daily, and every couple of days, bought a new recipe. This all made it easier and more predictable to collect your patterns, but it also took most of the excitement out of the process.

Overall, after about a month, you were done with the dailies (other than the daily dungeon).

The “hub” (or home town) of the Oracles faction

Even Raids can be Easy

At launch, LK was a little shy on raid content. It gave us two single boss raids: Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity and one big one. Naxxramas 2.0 had 15 bosses!

These three raids could be run either in 10 man or 25 man configurations. You could run both each week if you liked. I was never much for 10 man because the loot was considerably worse and they dropped the lower badge type (which I always had in excess). 10 man was a bit easier for most fights. OS was very easy normally (there was a progressive way to make it harder) and The Eye was harder, but not too hard. Both were short.

Even Naxx was tuned way easier than previous raids. But it was long. At this stage, Naxx 25 held a lot of good gear, but it quickly became quite a slog, particularly if you ran BOTH the 10 man and 25 man versions. It only took our guild about a month to have it on farm (where every boss died every week). Long before the next raid tier launched, we were pretty darn sick of Naxx. The revised Vanilla design was still excellent, and few players had seen the instance the first time around, but still, it felt a little lazy. Even the gear looked the same (although it was updated for level 80)!

The clever achievements did add a little fun. Title based ones like “The Undying” (where you cleared Naxx without any deaths) were very popular among the skilled.

Naxxramas 2.0: back for more ghoulish fun

PVP backburner

In BC, although tedious, PVP was a good way to progress your PVE game. LK saw the introduction of gear that was so heavily slanted toward PVP as to be nearly useless in PVE (compared to easy to get badge gear). This, combined with crazy battleground fatigue from BC, insured I never ran a battleground during the whole of LK (except for a few holiday achievements).

One exception was Wintergrasp, the new world PVP zone. Now, I couldn’t have cared less about WG itself, and found it pretty boring. But it was useful to run it occasionally so as to be in the right place at the right time to catch a group for the new PVP raid instance. This dungeon, located under WG keep, was available to the faction that most recently won the zone and contained at first one, then with each new tier, more raid bosses. These bosses were very easy, trivial to PUG, and dropped a mix of PVE and PVP gear, including the pants and gloves from each tier!

Getting lucky here was an easy way to save badges or DKP (Dragon Kill Points used to partition guild loot).

Archavon: PVP/PVE loot piñata waiting for the slaughter

3 Drakes, Ulduar and crazy hard modes

The early raids were easy by design. Blizzard wanted a wider range of players to experience the raiding content. But OS had an unusual mechanic for making it harder. You could kill Sartharion’s 3 drakes before the boss, and take him down easy, or you could leave up one, two, or three drakes. For each extra drake you fought at the same time as the boss, the loot was better. This itself didn’t make much of a gearing difference, but if you killed him with all three drakes up (3D) you got an elitist title and a chance at a cool specialty mount.

In the spring of 2009, when the next big raid, Ulduar, shipped, it took hard modes a step further. Ulduar was another giant raid with 14 bosses. It was long, involved, and pretty hard even normally. At least, the last third was. Some people loved it. I thought it was too big and took too long. And I really wasn’t a fan of the first boss’s tedious vehicle mechanic. A few of the bosses also had unusual “hard modes” like OS where you could trigger a different, much much harder fight. We attempted these a number of times but our guild only really managed hard modes on Flame Leviathan and XT-002. The hard modes dropped gear a half tier better.

If you more or less did all of these hard modes you could open up Algalon, and extra boss who was really cool, and really really hard. You only had an hour a week to fight him too, but killing him awarded a highly prestigious title.

Ulduar was home to some crazy-ass fights

Badge Inflation

During the LK period, Blizzard experimented with the badge system. At first, you had to manually loot your badges off bosses. It was easy to forget, and so they then added an “auto loot” that forced them into your bag. This worked, but was buggy and often caused server instabilities. Later, they moved the badges from your bags into a special currency section and added a system by which they would be automatically credited as soon as the boss was downed. This included a system to issue rewards when the final boss of a dungeon was cleared.

Additionally, as each successive raiding tier was released, it became necessary to make available new currencies. Players would have accumulated surplus badges in the older tiers, and to keep things fair they introduced new pairs of currencies (one for dungeons and 10 man and one for 25 man). Limited means of down converting newer currencies into older ones were experimented with. By the end of the expansion this became an unwieldy collection of 6-8 different badge currencies just for LK, so while the basic scheme was to be retained in Cataclysm, some cleanups were in order.

Overall, the badge system did remove some of the frustration inherent in the random nature of dropped loot. It helped you make steady progress regardless of your raiding situation. In the Vanilla/BC days this had been vastly more susceptible to your spec and how often your guild ran farm content. If you played an “easy to gear” spec like Holy Paladin (who has healing plate all to itself) previous tier or farm instances would literally shower you with loot. In the days when a Holy Pally could heal effectively in any armor type, you could passably gear one in just a run or two of a big instance like Kara or Naxx if other healers didn’t need the loot.

Another Hub

Summer saw another interim patch with a new rep, a new daily quest hub, a new 5 man, a revised level 80 version of Ony, and a new mid-sized raid. Grinding the rep mostly got you cosmetic gains again, but the new 5 man was useful in gearing alts as it dropped entry level epics very easily. Both the 5 man and the raid were lazy designs and took place inside the same basic arena map. You fought a series of bosses with no trash.

Lazy and uninspired as this was, it was efficient gearing wise.

10 + 25 + heroic 10 + heroic 25 = Burnout

The raid, Trial of the Crusader, had 5 bosses and could be run in 30-40 minutes. Blizzard tried something new with raid difficulty variations. TOC had 4 modes: 10 man, 25 man, 10 man heroic, and 25 man heroic. You could run all four modes every week! Because of the complex array of gear levels in Ulduar (10 man, 25 man, and their respective hard modes ranged from 213 – 239) there was rapid gear inflation going into TOC. 10 man was 232, 10 man heroic and 25 man 245, and 25 man heroic 258.

This all meant that almost anything from TOC was better than Ulduar (and of course Naxx and the like). 25 man regular was pretty easy and its 245 stuff was even better than Algalon loot. The place was fast and pretty easy. 10 man heroic wasn’t even THAT hard once you had 25 man gear. 25 man heroic was pretty hard, but not crazy.

All in all, a total loot fest that invalidated all the previous LK raiding content. It was also mind numbing because there was incentive to run it on 3-4 modes per week. Sometimes I’d run all four in one day, then switch over to an alt and run a few more! Everyone was very rapidly and totally burned out on the place. Good thing there wasn’t any trash.

Trial of the Crusader: all bosses, all the time, four times a week!

Ice Crown Patch, Magister’s Terrace redux

The penultimate major patch of LK introduced a lot of content. The giant Ice Crown Citadel raid opened along with three new 5 man dungeons. These followed the model set by the Isle of Quel’Danas in BC and were both more difficult and dropped far better loot. In fact, they dropped 232 in Heroic, which was equivalent to TOC 10 man. This continued to devalue loot from the original dungeons and first two tiers of raiding (Naxx and Uld). You could gear new tunes very quickly and effectively in 232 and 245 by a combination of these new dungeons and TOC farm runs.

Which prepared you well to run ICC for 258 and 264 loot. The first four bosses of ICC were very easy and the instance opened in waves. Average gear levels surged. Still, the middle and ending ICC bosses were not so easy and again separated out the solid and just average guilds. This gigantic instance was to be the main source of endgame raiding for the next year to come. The only exception was a one boss side raid that came in Spring of 2010. After a few months of endlessly repeating ICC many players moved on to alts or other games.

The creative hard modes of Ulduar must have required too much developer effort and constraint, so ICC retained the preselected Heroic mode like TOC, but Blizzard collapsed the normal and Heroic raid lockouts so you could run it at most twice on one character. This manual switch between difficulties is still the case today in Mists of Pandaria.

Icecrown Citadel looms in the background

Dual Spec

LK also introduced Dual Specialization. This continued Blizzard’s push toward quicker and easier by allowing your character to have two entirely different talent/action bar/glyph setups. This was most useful for tanks and healers as they could split between a raid and farming spec. Die hard PVP players could also split that way. For PVE only dps classes like my Warlock it was a nicety, but not essential. Still, it supported the varied play-style agenda that Blizzard had and has been pushing.

The Dungeon Finder

The ICC patch also brought one of the biggest changes to date: the dungeon finder. Previously, to run a 5 man dungeon, players had to assemble a group manually via global chat channels (idiotically confined to capital cities), all players came from the same server, and had to journey across the world to the instance. Once three arrived, it was possible to summon the other two.

The dungeon finder allowed players to queue for a category or specific instance and then instantly teleport into the dungeon together. It even drew from a pool of servers. In practice, this was nearly instant for tanks and healers and 10-15 minutes for dps. You could continue questing or dailies while waiting and you could replace players fairly quickly if one bailed. Afterward, you could teleport back to the exact spot you left.

Given that assembling a group required 1-2 hours of broadcasting in a capital city, this was enormously convenient. It meant that you could queue while playing, and then when ready, pop in, run a dungeon, and pop back with very little down time. But most players were from different servers and this meant that the incentive to stay with a problematic (or slightly problematic) group was very low. Gone was accountability, the sense that you would be branded lame by other players on the server. Gone was the camaraderie of making in-game friends during successful (and not so successful) runs. Server identity continued to erode.

The dungeon finder

Zerg for all

The combination of factors introduced in LK led to the rise of “zerg dungeon farming”:

Easier Heroic dungeons

Badge rewards from bosses

Daily rewards making it valuable to run instances long after players outgeared the instances and their direct loot

The dungeon finder allowed for rapid forming of runs

The net effect of all this was that late period LK dungeons became a sort of silent and hurried race through the instance. In the typical run, the tank charged forward, grabbing mobs willy nilly while dps aoed them down and healers barely had to do anything. Boss mechanics became nearly irrelevant. Subtlety and strategy were abandoned.

Wrath had this dramatic Nordic vibe

Conclusion

By the end of Lich King, nearly all the major mechanics that Blizzard introduced during the course of WOW evolution had come into play: Badges, the dungeon finder, dailies, reputation hubs, tier acceleration, split difficulties (heroic and normal), split raid sizes (10 and 25), profession currencies, separate pvp/pve tracks, achievements, and more. This endgame toolbox allowed for a wide range of player activities and for fairly continuous rewards along many of them. It allowed for much of the player base to experience raid content and tried to avoid sudden progress blockages for different player types.

The general feel and flavor of Lich King was also fantastic, but there were problems. In the name of accessibility, the epic nature of many encounters was sorely eroded. Numerous difficulty and size tracks and long reuse of content led to fairly extreme burnout. Overgearing of instances watered down designs that were already fairly forgiving and removed any strategic play in dungeons (i.e. crowd control and the like). In the name of balance, loot and rewards became monotonous and chore-like. Raid content was too sparse and too easy to cover the two year expansion. More burnout ensued.

I liked the expansion, and I give Blizzard an A for effort. They aren’t afraid to experiment and try to move the game in a better direction, even if those changes sometimes have negative consequences. They are particularly willing to overhaul class mechanics again and again. Overall, the LK endgame gave you more to do than ever before.

What was the original concept for the game and how/why did you come up with it? Was it a deliberate attempt to create a PS2 mascot to rival Crash?

Of course we wanted the J&D franchise to be as big (or bigger) than Crash. And while this didn’t come to be, it was certainly our goal. The formulation of new game ideas involves two aspects: genre and style.

As to gameplay genre: On the PS1, good looking free roaming 3D seemed impossible. The machine lacked any hardware sorting or clipping, and had a relatively low polygon count. Plus, the AI challenge of creating a camera that didn’t leave players puking was extremely daunting. So we locked down the viewpoint to improve graphics and focus on traditional Donkey Kong Country style gameplay.

But with Mario 64, Miyamoto showed that free roaming was possible, albeit on the N64 and with no small dose of camera frustration. By the time we began Jak & Daxter (January 1999) newer games like Banjo-Kajooie vastly improved the playability. Clearly, on the PS2, full 3D could be great.

Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?

With regard to style: With Crash we enjoyed enormous worldwide success in no small part due to our collaboration with Sony’s worldwide producers. So for J&D we set out to create a character and environment that merged elements from worldwide cultures. You can see the result in Jak, who is a hybrid of western cartoons and eastern manga.

We asked every Naughty Dog artist to spend a couple of days sketching concepts for the look of the game. We threw these on a giant table and picked elements we liked as a group.

It was an ambitious title for its time – what were your biggest challenges in realising your original vision? Was it a rocky development?

Like every first on a system Naughty Dog game, Jak had a rocky development. First of all, the PS2 was ludicrously difficult to program, particularly in those early days when no workable examples or libraries existed. On top of that, I made the audacious choice to write the entire game in a programming language of my own design called GOAL, creating a brand new compiler and debugger from scratch. In addition, to realize the ambitious graphical goals we invented a roster of brand new technologies: several different level of detail systems, perhaps 10 rendering engines, seamless loading from DVD, advanced runtime physics, and joint animation systems to rival the offline tools. It was really really crazy and basically took us about 20 months just on the engineering side before the engine was able to produce the kind of levels we wanted.

Can you tell me more about the mooted 3rd character and why it was axed?

There never were any serious plans for a third character. But we had more ambitious plans for Daxter in the beginning. He was supposed to be able to hop off your shoulder and run around and do stuff. That didn’t happen until the second game. Same with the vehicle stuff. We squeezed the racer in, but barely, and we had much more aggressive plans for it.

How close to your original concept was the finished game?

Very close. We wanted to put you into this beautiful fully rendered fantasy world and yet to allow full interactive exploration. We wanted no loading, elaborate storytelling, a camera you didn’t need to manually control, and both classic platform and vehicle gameplay.

Which element of the game are you most proud of, and which element, if any, do you feel fell short?

I’m both most proud and most torn over GOAL, my custom language and development environment. This ended up being so much harder than I thought, and is certainly the most sophisticated programming I’ve done in my career. In the end it was pretty awesome, although not without its quirks. I’m also supremely proud of our completely load-free seamless-world . We were the first to do this (I even have a patent on it!), and few have attempted since. It was a lot of work! And let’s not forget Jak’s control, which I personally programed. Jak has really good control, as good as any game ever. His animation is incredibly fluid, yet he is supremely responsive to both the player and the environment. Even basic elements of his control system were written and re-written a dozen times.

How would you like the first Jak & Daxter to be remembered? What has it brought to the medium of video games?

The single most important thing that J&D brought to the medium (and there are countless smaller things) is its consistent and complete integration of the game and story elements. This comes to full fruition in Jak 2, and continues peerlessly today in newer Naughty Dog games like Uncharted. Jak has a detailed and involved story, but it’s never a semi-interactive movie, it’s a video game! The storytelling does not come at expense of the gameplay.

Crash and Neo Cortex are my favorites, and I also have a really big sweet spot for Daxter (who is such a hoot). The Uncharted characters are awesome too, but I can’t take any responsibility for them, so the connection isn’t as personal. And don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, even back to the forgotten ones like Keef the Thief, but really Crash’s wicked orange grin melts my heart, and Cortex is who I secretly wanted to be… If I were a cartoon

An in-depth interview with Andy Gavin, creator of Crash Bandicoot and founder of Naughty Dog

Andy Gavin reflects and looks back on Crash Bandicoot, and Naughty Dog – calling Crash ‘…the really hot girlfriend that you dumped because of an important at the time argument’. He also offers some interesting perspectives on the games industry, drawing from his experiences – finally going on to tell us more about what he’s doing now, as a novelist – and how creating worlds has always been one of his great passions.

We interviewed Andy Gavin, the co-founder of Naughty Dog (with Jason Rubin) and creator of Crash Bandicoot. We asked Andy how he got in to the industry, about the inspirations, motives and ideologies behind Crash Bandicoot – one of the games industries seminal characters, and on on what makes a good videogame character. He also told us about the entirely different culture and ethos he built up at Naughty Dog – which meant putting the player first. We also asked him to reflect on his successes and ‘failures’ at Naughty Dog, about what he thinks of the company now and about his future plans. Today, Andy has turned his attention to writing – and is now an established novelist – so we also asked him about what he’s reading, and what he’s working on right now.

Just some of the highlights from this in-depth interview…

“Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game.”

“We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about… …we loved the word bandicoot.”

“I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.”

“Crash is a little like the really hot girlfriend that you dumped because of an important at the time argument. Then, years later when you run into her, find she’s a hooker with a crack problem’… ‘Naughty Dog on the other hand is the kid that grew up, got straight A’s at Harvard, then founded an internet company and made a fortune. Plus they still come home for the holidays and send Mom flowers on Valentine’s day.”

“My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds.”

“I don’t think the future [of games] will be better graphics – it’s not important any more. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilise game balance will be a challenge” …”new ways of paying will have a huge effect on the structure of games”

“One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition… Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projectswith a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.”

“Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control”

What inspired you to start Naughty Dog – how did you get in to the games industry?

In the 1970s I was hugely into fantasy novels, fantasy role playing games, and early video games. When I first encountered a computer it was only natural that I tried to make games. Back then, unless you knew how to program, computers were pretty much good for a blinking cursor. Then about two years into my programming career I met Jason Rubin. My programs were better than anyone our age, and his art skills (particularly on the computer) were better than anyone else’s. It was a match made in heaven and we started working on games together. In those early days we called the company JAM Software, but we renamed it to Naughty Dog around 1985.

“Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game.”

What were the aims behind Crash Bandicoot – what was the brief? Was it to create a character to compete with Sonic and Mario, and to create a mascot character for Sony – or something more?

Yep. At that time character action was one of the most popular genres, and one of our favorites. Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game. And it was born from the question: what would a 3D platformer be like? Well, we thought, you’d spend a lot of time looking at “Sonic’s Ass.” Aside from the difficulties of identifying with a character only viewed in posterior, it seemed cool. Although we worried about the camera, dizziness, and the player’s ability to judge. When it seemed likely that Sony didn’t have a mascot character of their own we jumped on that too. Essentially we planed for Crash to become exactly what it did – but the fact that we were successful still stuns me.

We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about… …we loved the word bandicoot.”

What was the inspiration behind Crash Bandicoot – where did the concept come from?
We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about. We bought a copy of Tasmanian Mammals – a field guide and flipped through. The Wombat, Potoroo, and Bandicoot fit the bill. We loved the word bandicoot. Personality-wise we felt he should be goofy and fun loving, and never talk.

What was the symbolism and ideology behind the mannerisms, attitude and behaviour you gave Crash Bandicoot?

As the machine didn’t really have the power to pull off giving Crash a voice that wasn’t lame, we needed to use animation to draw in the player emotionally. This jived with one of our main design goals, which was to make the animation better than had ever been seen in a game before. We wanted at least Looney Tunes level quality, if not Disney level. Animation is an emotional language and our top flight cartoon character designers showed us how to convey the whole range of human motion in the exaggerated vocabulary of traditional animation.

What was the reasoning behind the colours you gave Crash Bandicoot?

Simple, Crash needed to pop against the background so you could see him easily. Since he lived in a natural world of greens and grays orange was the hottest and most complementary colour. Real animals want to blend. Cartoons want to pop.

Crash Bandicoot is of a few games which has a real cultural impact and it’s created an extremely loyal group of superfans – a fan community which is still going strong, producing fan art, writing ‘fan fictions’ – some devoting much of their life to a character you created. What are your feelings about being behind a cultural icon?

It’s amazing that this happened and I feel very gratified to be a part of it. I chalk up one of the main reasons the game was successful to the character’s iconic quality. Crash is a sort of every-creature. While he has his goofy side, his natural enthusiasm and willingness to rebound from any upset (literally) make him highly endearing.

Crash Bandicoot Fan Art is very popular – this piece is by ‘ZoDy’ on an online community for artists called DeviantArt

Could you share any interesting facts or ‘secrets’ about Crash Bandicoot that even the biggest superfans may not know?

The original Crash Bandicoot has an entire extra level on the disk that is not accessible without a cheat device. It’s called Slippery Climb and was a monstrously big and difficult “climb on the rainy castle wall” level. It was cut because it was too hard and we didn’t have time to balance it properly.

What makes a good videogame character?

Video game characters aren’t especially subtle, but they are appealing. They need to be visually distinctive, with clear expression of personality traits. Visually, Crash is orange, big head, and gloves. Then on the personality side, playful, resilient, not the brightest bulb, but willing to go the extra mile.

Would you say that seminal ‘mascot’ characters like Crash, Sonic, and Mario are playing a less important or significant role in the games industry? Why do you think it might be the case?

It does seem that as games become more realistic they have less distinctive characters. Many current console games now are essentially military. The badass space marine is iconic, but not really distinctive. What makes one different from another?

“I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.”

Some say that Crash ‘failed to innovate’ over the years ‘rendering the character useless’ – what would you say to that?

It’s not fair of me to comment on the non Naughty Dog games. I feel that our four Crash games innovated relative to the speed of release (1996, ’97, ’98, ’99). We tried to really pack tons of new stuff into every successive game while keeping the best of the old. Fans knew that with our games they would really get their money’s worth. They voted with their wallets in huge numbers, and I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.

How much would you credit the sophistication of Naughty Dog technology to your background in LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory?

I was always a technically ambitious programmer, but MIT and the addition of Dave Baggett to our team really helped us up the ante. Dave and I fed off each other, each convincing the other that the next impossible thing was possible. But Mark Cerny also played no small role in this ambition. While he only coded a guest module or two in each game he’s brilliant and he really pushed Dave and I to rise to the next level.

Why did you decide to leave Naughty Dog 2004?

This is a complicated question and there are several answers. A) My contract was up and to stay (on terms I wanted) I would have had to haggle out a new one (boring). B) I was burnt out after over ten years of 90-110 hour work weeks. C) And most important, we had been training our top guys (Evan Wells, Stephen White, and Christophe Balestra) to run full game teams. They were ready.

Since handing over the reins, are you happy with how Crash Bandicoot has developed over the years?

Crash is a little like the really hot girlfriend that you dumped because of an important at the time argument. Then, years later when you run into her, find she’s a hooker with a crack problem.

What do you think of the company now? Is it how you visualised it would be?

Naughty Dog on the other hand is the kid that grew up, got straight A’s at Harvard, then founded an internet company and made a fortune. Plus they still come home for the holidays and send Mom flowers on Valentine’s day.

Would you ever consider returning to the company?

I still have tons of friends there. I just dropped by the other day and I had a rush of nostalgia for all the excitement and the sense of being part of something huge. But Evan and Christophe have things totally under control. More than that, they keep the ship running better than ever. So they don’t need another officer at the helm.

My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds.

Do you think you’ll ever return to the gaming industry as a whole – or even create another video game?

It’s hard to say. My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds. There are still games I crave making (achem… fantasy games). Really I’d love to build the most incredible MMO ever (I’m a huge WOW and Diablo fan) but then I think about the $150 million budget, the six year development plan, and the 200 person team…

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the gaming industry throughout your career?

Ha. I can’t even begin to answer that. My career started when the Atari 2600 was king and continues to modern console games, iPhone, and Facebook games. But the really big thing that is changing is the move away from the packaged goods model where a complete game is sold for $40-70. Download only games with subscription and micro transaction models will soon be the norm.

What do you make of the games currently being released now, …including Uncharted – Drake’s Deception? What do you make of console gaming as it is today …and the games you find most interesting right now?

UC3 is a blast, I love it. I still love fantasy games. My favorites this year, having finally quite WOW (again, for now), are UC3 and Dark Souls. I really want to play Skyrim too, which I’m sure I’ll love. I got it release day too, but I had one novel to finish editing and a second to publish – I didn’t dare put it in the machine.

Zoë Ainscough couldn’t recommend Uncharted 3 enough in a review which appeared recently on PostDesk Gaming

“I don’t think the future [of games] will be better graphics – it’s not important any more. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilize game balance will be a challenge” …”new ways of paying will have a huge effect on the structure of games”

What do you feel the future of gaming will be – and how is it going to develop over the next few years? Will it rely on enhancements in technology – or are you seeing other trends?

I don’t think it will be better and better graphics. That will happen to some extent, but it’s not important anymore. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilize game balance will be a challenge. Integration of even more elaborate social structure is another trend. I think that in the next few years we will actually start to see less of the incredibly expensive monolithic console games. As disks go away new ways of paying are going to rear their heads and this will have a huge effect on the structure of games.

Is this forming the basis for the future of gaming?

Across your entire career to date, what achievements are you most proud of? What was your biggest success?

#1 is founding Naughty Dog and establishing in it a kind of corporate culture and ethos that puts the player first. Really NDI is all about providing good value to the player. Value in games is wow factor, fun, novelty, and a polished entertainment experience that minimizes frustration. I’m also proud individually of each of my “projects.” This includes all thirteen major games I wrote, Flektor, my compilers, both my novels, and even my website:http://all-things-andy-gavin.com .

One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition… Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projects with a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.

What has been the biggest ‘failure’ that you’ve had to overcome in your career?

I don’t have what I consider any serious failures. More a lot of “lessons” of various degrees of severity. One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition. Hint this had nothing to do with Naughty Dog or Sony which went great. Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projects with a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.

Has being a novelist always been an ambition of yours?

I’ve been an avid reader my whole life (over 10,000 novels and who knows how many non-fiction volumes). Mostly fantasy, horror, historical or science fiction. In high school, I won several national literary awards for my short stories and I was an editor and contributor to our high school literary magazine. In college, despite being a diehard science guy, I took creative writing classes (sometimes I was the only guy) and submitted stories to Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines (not that they ever bought any!). I wrote the stories for some of our games (don’t judge my novels by that, in the old days games couldn’t afford real stories). But the insane work output needed for Playstation games didn’t leave me the time to write and so it was with considerable zeal that I turned to it seriously two and a half years ago.

“My first novel, The Darkening Dream, was just published. You can find out all about it at the-darkening-dream.com and it’s for sale now.”

Tell us about your new books – and what are you working on right now?

I have three books in various stages of production. My first novel, The Darkening Dream, was just published. You can find out all about it athttp://the-darkening-dream.com and it’s for sale now. This is a fast paced historical fantasy about a bunch of teens who try to stop some really creepy supernatural chaps from maiming, killing, and destroying the world. The teens get in over their heads. Really over their heads. All of the magic (and there’s a lot) is based on real historical occult, which makes it much creepier than the made up stuff – because truth is stranger than fiction. My second book, Untimed, is a YA time travel novel about the crazy adventures of a boy no one remembers, who falls through a hole in time and finds himself lost in the past. It’s really slick, funny, and fast paced. I just finished editing it and am now figuring out who I want to publish it. Then I’m supposed to be writing my third novel, but instead I’m answering interview questions and learning how to layout a print ready file. J

What are you reading right now?

Julian, by Gore Vidal. This is a historical bestseller from the 60s about Julian the Apostate who is a really interesting Roman Emperor from late antiquity. It’s part of a particular a branch of investigation for my new novel. All of my books involve history in some way. One of my ambitions is to show that history doesn’t have to be boring, quite the contrary. Untimed bounces through four centuries and it’s lightning paced.

“Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control”

What are your plans and ambitions for the future?

In the short run (2012) I’d like to finish two more novels (gulp) and turn The Darkening Dream and Untimed into bestsellers. The writing part of being a writer is really fun and creative – although way more work than I imagined, and I imagined a lot. Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control. There are limitations of the medium, POV, etc., but there are few technical tradeoffs and no budgets or meetings. Only time and imagination limit what you can do. This is why, despite the profusion of all sorts of fantastic new mediums, novels are still one of the beststorytelling devices. Most games are more about gameplay and fun than story – even if Uncharted has been changing that. Long form television (like high budget cable shows) is also very good now. I love HBO and Showtime dramas. They sport some of the best writing in film or television today. Film is really too short for in depth characterization, although the best of them rise above this limitation.

The Darkening Dream is an “ominous vision and the discovery of a gruesome corpse lead Sarah Engelmann into a terrifying encounter with the supernatural in 1913 Salem, Massachusetts. With help from Alex, an attractive Greek immigrant, Sarah sets out to track the evil to its source,never guessing that she will take on a conspiracy involving not only a 900-year vampire, but also a demon-loving Puritan warlock, disgruntled Egyptian gods, and an immortal sorcerer, all on a quest to recover the holy trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel.Relying on the wisdom of an elderly vampire hunter, Sarah’s rabbi father, and her own disturbing visions, Sarah must fight a millennia-old battle between unspeakable forces, where the ultimate prize might be herself”.

A couple of weeks ago I went back to Naughty Dog to do some interviews for the Jak & Daxter Collection, which releases tomorrow (February 7). And of course you should go buy this right away, only one click AFTER you buy my novel, The Darkening Dream. But my thoughts about the visit have been logged on the Naughty Dog blog:

While I’m still good friends with many Naughty Dogs and frequently see them socially, it’s been a couple years since I was in the office itself – and this was my first time in the new gigantic Watergarden 2.0 space.

Wow! My baby is all grown up and popped out a helluva pack of rugrats. When I left, the office was 25,000 sq/feet and we had about 80 people – which at the time, seemed enormous enough – now it’s over twice that big with more than twice the folks. From the walls hang giant murals of Naughty Dog masterpieces. It’s enough to make you feel small…

Modern man has a wide variety of “pure” storytelling mediums, like film, long form television, and novels. While these have some very significant differences they all share the same basic focus on plot and character. Typically at least, good stories introduce a character with problems, get you to like them, then chronicle the struggle as they are compelled to change and adapt to overcome these problems. In the end, they either do so, or are defeated to teach us a lesson (a variant we call tragedy).

These elements: character, plot, and transformational arc, are completely central to the normal story (I deliberately ignore weird experimental storytelling). Really, they are the core of what makes a good film or novel.

Roman mosaic showing comedy (right) and tragedy (left)

But with a game, this whole business is secondary. The primary focus of a game is fun. And fun through gameplay. Does Tetris have any character or plot? Did even Doom? No. But they were fun games. Really fun.

Games such as Naughty Dog’s Jak & Daxter or Uncharted strive to bridge these gaps by offering both. This is very difficult because they don’t really serve each other.

The gameplay in Uncharted 2, for example, has three primary modes: survival gunplay, platforming, and puzzle solving. The player must assess the layout of the level, learn it, and navigate it without getting killed. This involves anticipating the enemies and taking them out first. You use the weapons at your disposal, the mechanics, and the terrain provided to do so. With platforming you need to come to understand what the character can do physical, find your way, and successfully traverse the route.

Some games do focus on story

When these are done well, when the design is varied, the levels pretty, the enemies cool, and the challenges measured, challenging and above all, doable – it’s fun. Uncharted 2 is such a game.

It also has a pretty darn good story which is woven in with the design of the levels and the challenges. This adds to the whole thing. Watching the next segment of story becomes part of your reward for finishing a segment. There is a tremendous level of art that goes into getting both of these to work at the same time, but certainly each is constrained at times by the needs of the other.

Content in games is expensive and difficult to make. Therefore it needs to repeat. You really do need to shoot the same enemy hundreds of times. Otherwise the enemy isn’t providing enough mileage to justify the labor involved to create him. The player is also in control and therefore the consequences of his play affect success or failure.

My first novel

But in storytelling, success and failure are the carefully monitored heartbeat of any good story. You bring the protagonist up, dash him down, grind him into the ground, lift him up, slam him sideways. I knew this intuitively when writing my first novel, The Darkening Dream. I’ve read so many books and watched so many films and shows that it seemed “obvious.” But at the same time, it turned out to be far from easy. Writing a good story has less constraints than making a good game, but it’s still extremely difficult. You need to be constantly balancing the issues of character, motivation, the logic of the plot, and the need to seesaw the dramatic tension. In the end stylistic concerns sometimes overwhelm dramatic ones (to the reader’s detriment).

In a game, it’s even more complicated, and there is barely a chance of hitting all the right dramatic notes. The player has a lot to say about this natural up and down pacing, so the story-based game tries to separate how well you are really doing from the actual plot. Usually death or failure in the game causes the player to merely repeat some segment of the game (and hence the story), when they finish the level and get the next segment of storytelling, they’ll get it regardless of whether they died once or 100 times. The better player merely proceeds faster.

This is different, but even more problematic in a less linear game such as World of Warcraft. There, the mechanics of the game heavily distort the conceits of storytelling. The story is even broadly linked to the chronological evolution of the game in real time. For example, in December of 2009 Blizzard released the Icecrown Citadel patch of Wrath of the Lich King, making it possible for players to finally reach and confront the ultimate boss of the expansion (the titular Lich King). But the fact is, in order to properly maintain the reward mechanics of endgame raiding, each character was and often did, progress through this segment of the story once, or even twice a week.

The Lich King

Now, two years later, the Lich King has been defeated, the world of Azeroth has been broken, yet it’s still possible to go back to Icecrown and take on Arthas again. And again. Ditto for any of the several hundred even older bosses. Players accept that they have random access to a long and convoluted story. In fact, the need to generate so much gameplay in WOW has created a body of lore that gives the Silmarillion a run for its money. But the way in which it’s experienced mutes the emotional intensity.

What really provides the excitement in WOW (and many other games), isn’t the question of whether the dragon queen Onyxia lives or dies, but the – shall we dare say – drama of whether she does tonight, for us, the group fighting her. And more importantly, will she drop the Nemesis skullcap (arbitrary cool piece of loot) one has been trying to get for six months.

It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic coin-op and Atari dominated home market imploded), all major video game machines were from Japan until the arrival of the Xbox. Things were dominated by Nintendo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Nintendo, Sony… you get the picture.

And in the days before the home market eclipsed and destroyed the arcade, Japan completely crushed everyone else. Only the occasional US hit like Mortal Kombat even registered on the radar.

Miyamoto, creator of Mario, playing Crash 1. I'm standing behind him off frame

All of this, not to mention the cool samurai/anime culture and ridiculously yummy food (see my sushi index!), made us American video game creators pretty much all Miyamoto groupies.

But on the flip side, American games, if they even made it to the land of the rising sun at all, almost always flopped.

Japanese taste is different the wisdom went. Special. Foreign games even had a special name over there (which I have no idea how to spell). These “lesser” titles were stocked in a seedy back corner of your typical Japanese game store, near the oddball porn games.

So it was with great enthusiasm and limited expectations that we approached the mutual Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, and Sony decision that we were going to take the Japanese market really seriously with Crash. Sony assigned two brilliant and dedicated producers to us: Shuhei Yoshida and his then assistant Shimizu (aka Tsurumi-0600). They sat in on every major planning meeting and we scheduled the whole fall for me to localize the game in exacting detail (while we were simultaneously beginning work on Crash 2!).

For the most part, Yoshida-san made things happen and Shimizu, who has literally played like every video game ever made and read like every manga, worked the details. I (with a bunch of help from the artists) had to put in the changes.

Yoshida-san front and center, Shimizu on the far left, Rio (joined the team during Crash 2) on the far right

Somehow Yoshida-san was able to maneuver the game into being not one of those funny foreign games, but an official bona fide release of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. the first party Japanese studio. And it was to be sold and marketed pretty much like it had been made in Japan! Wow!

So to pull off this cultural masquerade Jason and I decided that Shu (as Yoshida-san was affectionately known) and Shimizu got pretty much whatever they wanted. They after all, knew the mysterious Japanese market. Which turned out to be pretty darn true. And, besides, both are really really smart and crazy hard workers (Shimizu is famous for sleeping under his desk) and so we all got along famously.

The gameplay itself wasn’t really too much of an issue. Shimizu did help us smooth out some sections and make them easier (often by adding extra continue points − opposite of Europe). But there were a lot of other changes.

The Crash 1 main titles, in Japanese

First of all, we had to translate the text. Some of this wasn’t so bad. But the main logo was a 3D object and Jason had to painstakingly create a version of the paper design the Japanese provided us — which required lots of checking from Shimizu as he doesn’t speak Japanese.

Above is the opening in Japanese.

And things got even harder (for me) with the in game text. The Playstation didn’t have a lot of video memory and we were using a medium resolution 512 pixel wide mode anyway. What little there was, we had pretty much consumed. But the Japanese language has four alphabets! One is Latin, two are similar but different looking phonetic alphabets, and the last is the giant Kanji pictographic database. Kanji would’ve been impossible, but we needed to cram the two extra phonetic sets in. Plus the characters are more intricate than the Latin alphabet and need more pixels. I can’t remember what I did to squeeze them in, but I do remember it was painful. One part I do recall was implementing the sets of letters that vary only by an extra dot or ” mark by drawing them with two sprites (hence saving video ram).

Once the font was installed we had to input the crazy looking “shift JIS” text. One of the problems in those days was that the text editors all 8-bit, unlike today were 16-bit typesets dominate. And with a European language you can usually tell if a line of text had gotten swapped or mangled, but in Japanese… and even worse, in shift JIS it just looks like a bunch of garbage characters.

So again, Shimizu had to check everything. A lot.

Our opening and closing cut scene dialog was recorded in Japanese using very high profile Japanese actors (so they told me). We replaced those audio files (using one of my automated systems of course!). There were also a good number of cases throughout the game where we had placed text in textures. The configuration screens, loading screens, load/save screens and all sorts of other ones. These all needed new versions. We collected all of these textures, shipped them out to Japan and got back Shimizu certified versions in exactly the same sizes with the Japanese text. I used and upgraded the system that I had built for the European version so that any file (texture, audio, etc) in the game could be “replaced” by a file of the same name in the same directory with a .J on the end (or a .S, .E, .F, .G, .I for various European permutations). The level packaging tool would automatically suck up the most appropriate version and shove it in the J versions of the levels. I’m not sure we left ANYTHING untranslated. Even Japanese games usually had more Engrish. Achem, English. I so remember a Castlevania with “Dlacura’s grave.”

Then the Japanese came up with this idea of having Aku Aku explain various gameplay mechanics to you when you break his boxes, much like the raspberry boxes in Super Mario World. This was a great idea, except it meant that the game was suddenly filled with about 200 extra paragraphs of text. Undecipherable text. I had to squeeze that into the levels too. More problematic was the seemingly simple fact that when a big block of text comes up on the screen the game effectively needs to pause so the player can read it. You can’t just “hit pause” but need a separate state. This simple feature caused a lot of bugs. A lot. But we stomped them out eventually.

Above you can see a walk through of the first level. A lot of the PITA localization work was in the save screens (big fun: character entry screen in three Japanese alphabets) and the various statistic screens at the end of the level. I think the Japanese allowed us to do away with the horrible password system and use memory card only.

The Japanese box and CD with its very strange Crash and Eve painting -- it was nice and colorful

The Japanese also had some famous actor record a whole collection of really zany sounding grunts and noises that Crash was to make. Shimizu lovingly crafted long lists of extremely specific places in the game where exactly such and such exclamation was to be uttered. He was never one to spare either of us from a great deal of work But his willingness to tackle any task himself, no matter how tedious, made him hard to refuse. I also had to squeeze all these extra samples into the extremely tight sound memory, mostly by downgrading the bit-rate on other sounds. This caused Mike Gollom, our awesome sound design contractor to groan and moan. “3.5k is pure butchery” he’d complain. I found this SGI tool that used a really advanced new algorithm to downgrade the sounds, they sounded twice as good at any given bit-rate than the Sony tool.

Anyway the really funny bit about these Crash sounds was the subjective feel they left us Americans with. Strange! They made Crash sound like a constipated old man. But the Japanese insisted they were perfect. I guess they were right because the game sold like crazy over there.

Another weird audio difference was that five of the songs were swapped out for new ones. Josh Mancell the composer put it this way:

An 11th hour decision made by the Sony people in Japan. They felt that the boss rounds needed to sound more ‘video game-like’. The only reference they gave was music from the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. I only had a day or so to write all those themes. My favorite comment was about the original Tawna bonus round music. It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

There were also a host of minor but strange modifications we needed to make. One was that a few characters originally had four fingers, which is typical of most American cartoon characters. Apparently the Japanese have a more than usual dislike of disfigured humanoids. Fingers were added (to make them the normal five). There were a whole bunch of little visual, audio, and gameplay changes Shimizu had us make to the game. Most of these I felt were neutral, different but not really better or worse, so I just trusted him and put them in. Occasionally if they were a really pain I pushed back.

Eventually, right around Thanksgiving, just in time for Jason and I to head to Japan to promote it, the Japanese version was ready!

Coming soon, I plan on a part 2 covering Japanese marketing and promotions!

The concept for Sucker Punch, whacked as it is, is actually pretty decent. The movie is also gorgeous and stylized. Yet… it just doesn’t really work at any rational level. Part Kill Bill, part Pan’s Labyrinth, part Inception, part Sin City, part video game cut scene, this film is all CGI glitz and fetishistic style. It’s also worth noting that the writer/director, Zach Snyder, brought us those other style over substance “classics”: Watchmen and 300.

As to the plot. Wait, I can’t really use that word because as I’ve discussed at length before plot is the action created by opposition to the protagonist’s desire. The characterization in this film is about as solid as a whiff of gunpowder and we have only the most basic desire: escape. The film opens with a comic book style summary of the setup: girl has been orphaned, framed by her evil step-father, committed to a mental asylum (in the late 40s), and scheduled for a lobotomy. From this grim — but actually dramatically interesting — setup we devolve into a series of nested fantasies.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love reality bending films. Pan’s Labyrinth is my favorite film of the last decade. They’re just hard to get right and it’s key to overlap and contrast the inner and outer worlds. In Sucker Punch, the outermost (or real) world is seen for about three minutes at the beginning and again for about three minutes at the end. Oddly, a middle layer in which the girl (named only Babydoll) imagines herself a prisoner not in a mental institution but in a stylish brothel serves up what little plot and characterization we have. This itself parallels with the real world and might have been interesting if we spent any time there. Instead we are propelled one after another into a series of really cool looking fantasy set pieces. Oddly, the “plan” to escape the institution (brothel, asylum — both? neither?) is broken down into a quest of five video game like steps, conveniently provided by Scott Glenn in a role known only as “The Wise Man”. Each step, which in the midworld amounts to things like: “steal a lighter from the fat-cat mayor who is visiting to have his way with the fifteen year-old hotties” is instead rendered into an “action packed” fantasy that has very very little bearing on the task. Also, this setup, which is pretty awful but intriguing is whitewashed due to a pansy PG-13 rating.

We have a big fight in a cool asian temple against three giant robo-samurai-knights. Each has his own weapon! Yah video games. This even includes a Doom-style gatling gun.

Immersion in a steampunk super-sized World War I trench battle, which honestly for about one minute took my breath away.

A return to the assault on Helm’s Deep, complete with orcs in danger of lawsuit from WETA and big fire breathing dragons (the dragon is the lighter — yeah, that’s deep connection).

And a sci-fi shootout bomb run on a super high tech train filled with killer robots. Snooze!

The first three of these, particularly the WWI fight, are gorgeous. I mean really cool looking. But they are ten-fifteen minute fight scenes with almost no dialog set to ethereal music like a version of “White Rabbit” sung by Emiliana Torrini. (NOTE: I did order the soundtrack, that part was awesome) For a minute or three each they seem intensely cool. But they’re just shooting, jumping, slicing and more shooting. We don’t know who these characters are. They’re in a dream within a dream. And we don’t care. They are shooting at thousands of horde-like video game style enemies. We don’t care. Somehow each of these fights results in achieving the fairly straightforward midworld objective. The connection is highly non-obvious.

Highly non-obvious = non-existent.

It’s also worth noting the extremely bizarre infusion of manga/game infused stylization. First of all, by including Comic book, 40s faux-gangster, Asian, WWI, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi we have a serious total complete massive buttload overabundance of style. Any one of these would have made for a highly stylized firm. Extreme too too too too muchness. But the girls in their weird “warrior schoolgirl” outfits is whacky — although I am a lover of midriff — and I could have gotten drunk taking a shot every time someone thunked down a gun in slow-mo or gotten rich with a penny for every giant CGI gun casing that flipped toward the camera. This is of the more is more school of filmmaking. Synder should have studied more closely what makes Pan’s Labyrinth a brilliant film: Two styles contrasting, with one being hyper realistic, a strong tie between the fantasy and reality planes. And most importantly: highly developed characters including one of the most terrifying genuine evil types to cross the silver screen in years.

What do you do after founding and retiring from one of video games’ most successful development houses? If you’re Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin, you write books.

The first of said books is The Darkening Dream, a shadowy fantasy novel about a young girl caught up in a battle that pits ancient supernatural forces like vampires and Egyptian gods against each other.

the Diablo 3 opening cinematic was released. The game itself should be coming in Q1 2012. Ah, so many games, so little time. I haven’t even had the moment(s) to pop in Skyrim. Been too busy packaging The Darkening Dream and editing Untimed.

Naughty Dog, the company I founded, has just released the trailer for their new game — and new franchise! This is the first new series since Uncharted launched in 2007. I have to say the new one looks totally awesome because it’s well — post apocalyptic zombie (which I love) — and in true Naughty Dog fashion totally gorgeous. Plus I love spunky heroines. This one, seemingly, but not actually voiced by actress Ellen Page of Juno fame* is totally cute, in a kind of jailbait sort of way.

I can totally see how the kind of intimate hand to hand and gunplay mechanics that Naughty Dog has been perfecting with Nathan Drake would adapt perfectly to this sort of The Road meets Juno world.

So I’m even more excited than I was for Uncharted 3, which is saying a lot!

*NOTE: According to this website, the leads are Miss Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, as given by tweet from someone at Naughty Dog. And @Neil_Druckmann, my friend and the lead designer confirmed via twitter too, so it’s accurate.

Founded by aspiring game developers Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin back in 1986, the pair knocked together a number of little-known titles on the Apple II and Amiga before changing their company’s name to Naughty Dog. …a four-game deal with Universal Interactive Studios, starting with Way of the Warrior – a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game for 3DO created using footage crudely filmed in an apartment [led to] none other than Crash Bandicoot on PSone.

…

The original Crash Bandicoot was one of the most important games on the original PlayStation. Not only did it give the then faceless platform a much-needed mascot – and one with bags of charm – but it also really showed what this powerful new CD-based console from Sony could do.

…

Naughty Dog, it seems, is as good at dreaming up new blockbuster adventure franchises as Sony is at making consoles. Fast forward to the present era, and although both of its founders have moved on to new ventures, Naughty Dog remains the name on the box of one of the PS3’s biggest exclusive franchises. Uncharted’s unrivaled cinematics and truly breathtaking set-pieces demonstrate a fantastic developer working at the absolute peak of its creative ability.

I deployed a new video game topic page yesterday. This was a good chunk of work. I use a modified iThemes Builder child theme and so continued to use their custom layout and variable widget systems to build out a special page to replace the older, uglier, video games page. First though, I had to hack into the code and modify the way in which the sharing icons and related posts were being inserted. WordPress plugins often have automatic insertion into the end of the content, but as soon as you start getting a more sophisticated layout with more than one “content” on the same page that starts to be problematic. I had to turn it off and insert it manually into the right templates.

Then I spent an entire day exploring ways to implement different grids of magazine style excerpts for particular types of posts on particular pages. I ended up writing the code myself, but using Builder’s extension system to inject into the layout’s I wanted. I got it working for this page, but I’m only about 90% satisfied. There are still some mysteries. Like how to convince CSS to extend each entry down to the height of the tallest one on a line. I align them with “vertical-align: top”, but I don’t know how to match up the bottoms. I’d also like to improve the handling of the thumbnail photos and I need to figure out how to generalize my extension so I can use it on different pages. That being said, I still think it’s better looking than the old page.

With regard to my books, busy busy. I’m waiting on a second sketch for my new, professional cover for The Darkening Dream. That should come any day. I’ve pretty much finished up the interior artwork, but I’m not ready to post it just yet — soon. I’ve been working through proofs of the interior book design as well, which is looking great.

I also got back the full line edit of Untimed yesterday. Two of my editors, Renni Browne and Shannon Roberts did a simultaneous full line edit. This is on top of four drafts of higher level discussions. Getting 320 pages of line edit back is a lot to digest in one sitting! Look at the example page to the right. That’s just one page worth of edits. I have to go over them all and decide what to keep, what not, and how to rework anything suggested by the comments. But it’s worth it. Books need editing. It’s essential to have more than one set of eyes on them. And, ultimately, it’s still my book — I decide what stays and what goes.

Dark Souls is an interesting entry into the 2011 holiday game rush. At one level, it has state of the art graphics and physics-based ultra-visceral hand-to-hand fantasy combat. But it’s also a throwback to old school RPG game design.

This puppy doesn’t baby you in any way. You’re instantly tossed into an arcane character creation screen with a cryptic interface. You’re forced to make choices about class and attributes armed only with one sentence descriptions.

And it only gets less accessible from there.

After a pretty but incomprehensible bit of backstory you’re tossed into a grim and desolate undead prison. This serves as a “training level” and it is a lot easier than what is to come. But even this little intro ain’t easy — and the game gives you little or no clue what you’re supposed to do our how the mechanics work.

Now on the other hand: the control feels pretty darn good. And after a few minutes the hand to hand combat feels great. Vicious, but great. There’s a real satisfaction to smacking around the depressingly dank baddies.

Then comes the first “real” level. And I start to die. And die. And die. And die some more. The game is so hard that the first night I spend two straight hours dying between the first and second checkpoints of the first level! My shoulder muscles got so knotted that I was literally in agony. And I didn’t even reach that bonfire (checkpoint). I had to go out.

But all I could think about was getting back to it. And when I returned, agitated as hell, at eleven at night, I wisely decided to force myself not to play — or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. Instead I came back to it the next afternoon and got through on my first shot. Then, entering virgin territory, I started to die again. And again.

This is a game that requires you to learn every little nuance of each stretch between the unfairly distant checkpoints. Death has a steep penalty: taking all your liquid souls (experience) from you. If you can reach your corpse before you die again you can recover it. Unfortunately, your corpse is usually being guarded by whatever killed you last time!

Relentlessly cruel as the game design is. I can’t help but want to keep playing. This might be the first action fantasy game where the you fight with hand held weapons and it actually feels like you’re fighting with hand held weapons. The physics based swords, axes, maces and whatnot hammer relentlessly on your foes — and on you. It’s pretty cool.

And the art design is damn creepy and atmospheric. Weird and mysterious. The enemies are varied and dastardly. I dig it. I’ll just have to see how far I can force myself through the sadistic gauntlet of evil!

A Twitter friend of mine dug up this ancient and forgotten interview that I gave from my Cambridge Mass apartment in 1994, during the development of our 3DO fighting game, Way of the Warrior. The original post can be found here, but he gave me permission to repost the whole thing here. It’s certainly one of my older interviews on record. I did a number in the 80s but those are pre-web and certainly long lost (unless I comb through my parent’s basement for old copies of EGM and the like!).

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Back in May I had a chance to interview Andy Gavin, one half of the team that makes up Naughty Dog Software. The other half consist of Jason Rubin who’s a graphic arts specialist. These guys are based in Cambridge, MA., where I happen to be from, and have created what may be the best fighting game for the 300. I played Way of the Warrior and it definitely blows the first Mortal Kombat away easily. The game is similar to Mortal Kombat in many ways. The digitized characters, fatalities, combos, blood galore, hidden characters, and special attacks are all here. What Way of the Warrior does is take if a step further with an amazing AI(Artificial Intelligence), characters that shrink and grow, over 50 attack moves for each character, 100% 3D scrolling, hidden weapons, interactive backgrounds, bonus items, and so much more. Let’s have a talk with Andy and see what he has to say about Way of the Warrior.

VGT: When did you first start programming video games?Andy: About 1 0-12 years ago, the first game we made was Ski Crazed on the Apple II, which came out in 1986. It sold a couple thousand copies. Dream Zone was our next game that sold about 15000 copies. Keef the Thief, from Electronic Arts, did much better and sold about 50,000 copies on various machines. We then did Rings of Power, which was our only Genesis cartridge. It’s was very complex and sophisticated and took about 2 1/2 years to produce.VGT: When was Naughty Dog founded?Andy: Well , Naughty consists of mainly Jason Rubin and myself . Naughty got its names from a cartoon character that Jason drew. (Andy showed me a picture of an old Naughty Dog logo). Their new logo is on their flyers. The character was created about 8 years ago.VGT: Is there any downside when programming on the 300 with their CO’s? Does access time and RAM space affect your games?Andy: Well, first of all the 3DO has 3 megabytes, not mega bits of RAM, which is bigger then the largest SNES cartridge. The CD itself is 660 megabytes . There are technical issues that need to be addressed when programming on the 3DO. One has to use clever designs to reduce and eliminate load times. In Way of the Warrior the entire program was designed in what we call, Asynchronous. The loading is done while you play, by anticipating what needs to be loaded’ in advance with a hardware process called DMA (Direct Memory Access) . There ‘s a short pause going into a fight, but once the action has begun, there is no pause. Players can perform all their moves, with fatalities, 3D scrolling and the stereo music blaring, but with no load time.VGT: So even though we’re playing continuously, there’s no slow down what’s so ever.Andy: Yes, the 3DO is capable of loading stuff without any slow down. However, many previous CD games, including the 3DO, have had notable slow delays.

VGT: Like the Sega CD for instance?Andy: Yes, this is due to sloppy, programming and not being aware of how to program on CD’s. It’s a difficult issue when writing programs that can actually play and load at the same time. It’s a technical challenge. With good program design the load time can be minimized. In turn, the quality of the sound effect, music, FMV, and game play surpass any cartridge game. Cartridge games only have a limited amount of memory in which you can program. CD’s only cost a dollar to manufacture, while cartridges can cost anywhere from 20-30 dollars. CD’s have enormously superior cost to storage ratio.VGT: Can the access time for the Sega CD be reduced with technical design programming?Andy: They can definitely reduce the access time. I don’t know that much about the Sega CD though. I don’t think their DMA is better than the 3DO. The 3DO has 4-5 times more memory. It also has a CD drive that’s twice as fast. It has decompression hardware that effectively doubles the speed. It has a unique and extremely powerful custom DMA architecture that can move graphics from disk to memory to screen and back without effecting game play.VGT: What makes Way of the Warrior different from all the other fighting games?Andy: As I mentioned before, I have an Artificial Intelligence Graduate degree from MIT. The computer players in WOTW are much more sophisticated then in other fighting games. Whereas they often resorted to patterns to beat the human players, there are no patterns programmed in for WOTW. It uses research grade AI that learns the best way to beat you. It’s extremely cunning and different and actually looks like a real player fighting by adapting to the situation and using all it’s moves.VGT: Is it always learning consistently more and more each time you play it?Andy: Yes.VGT: What about the characters? What makes them so special.Andy: The characters have around 50 normal moves and about 15-20 special moves. These moves reflect their styles and personalities. There are many secrets that use the background area and hidden characters can also be found.VGT: So is each character equal in sense or are some stronger then others?Andy: All the normal human characters are designed to be equal even though they’re different.VGT: Well, I remember the first Street Fighter II game had very uneven characters. Some had a major advantage over others.Andy: It’s tough to get the characters exactly even. We tried to get them as close as possible. People also developed different strategies for beaten the other characters. There are a lot of unique techniques and abilities for each character. Like Konotori, which means “stork” in Japanese, can flap and stay in the air longer. Major Gaines has special steroids’ implants that can change his size and therefore the amount of damage he receives become minimal. Nikki Chan is a Chinese Kung Fu artist who can do flips with special moves. She’s very fast and agile. Crimson Glory has close in grabs and special multi-missles that can be fired. Some character has special weapons. Nabu Naga has a sword and throwing stars. Shaky Jake has a staff.VGT: There seems to be a little bit of everything from all the other fighting games in this game.Andy: The other fighting games are very narrow. Most of them are to much alike. What we tried to do was take everything good from all the other fighting games and combine them all into WOTW. We’ve added unique features with better graphics, sounds, 3D backgrounds, special magic and potions, panning and zooming, background interaction, and larger more detailed characters.

VGT: Was the process of digitizing the characters the same as Mortal Kombat.Andy: There are similarities. We’ve never seen them actually doing it. We have seen photos in magazines. They are actually a little more regimented then ours. Their fighting engine is much less sophisticated then WOFW. It requires that every characters moves line up to the exact same position. When each character does a high punch in Mortal Kombat, they high punch at the exact same point. So when they digitize their characters they have to line up perfectly. In WOTW, every character has its own information so not all characters need to have a high punch. Some of the characters punch high, some low, while others are tall, short, big and small. There’s no requirement that the character be the same size. We built the character the same way the actor would appear, rather then force them to convert to our pre-requirements.VGT: With the 300 having such a small user base at this point, do you think it can increase sales and become successful?Andy: We think it has a good chance. All game systems start off with a small user base. People forget the Genesis came out in August of 1989 and 2 years later when the Super Nintendo was released it only had 700,000 machines out there and only 23 games after the first year. 300 already has more then that. The 300 is the first of the 32/64bit machines and the difference is academic. Sony, Sega, and Nintendo have all announce 32/64bit systems that won’t be available until 1995. The 300 will be the only significant 32bit machine when Christmas comes. It will have a year of development by then and the price will probably drop some more. So I think it’s in good shape. We hope WOTW with help sell systems.VGT: Are there any other projects being worked on for the 300?Andy: We have 2 other projects we’re working on, but we can’t comment on them at this point.VGT: Do you think that CD’s are the way to go for our future programmers?Andy: I think this year is the year of the CD’s. It already has the PC market. It offers so many advantages in cost and amount of storage . The access time disadvantage can be overcome with well-designed machines and good programming techniques.

VGT: Are there any other types of games that Naughty Dog will be working on besides fighting?Andy: We signed a deal to put WOTW in the arcades.VGT: If WOTW does come to the arcade, will it be different then the 3DO version.Andy: It would be a bit different. The basis of it would be the same. There are different constraints for the arcade version. The 3DO is capable of producing arcade quality games.VGT: What’s the most outstanding achievement you’ve seen in video games today? What games really blow your mind?Andy: I have favorites over the years. I tried Ridge Racer which was very impressive looking, but had mediocre game play. In the PC world, “DOOM!” was very good looking. It shows us that 3D games are here and can be produced very well, even on PC’s.VGT: Well, that’s about it for the questions. Thank you very much for taking the time to be interviewed by VGT. We all hope that Way of the Warrior is very successful and we look forward to reviewing it and any other games that are produced by Naughty Dog.Andy: Your welcome. Thank you for choosing Naughty Dog as your first interview. We look forward to reading VGT when it’s released.

This is back to 2011 Andy. It’s so worth watching the totally hilarious video from our 1994 masterpiece (LOL). As you can see, we went for over the top.